monoceros4

I really, really hope that the movie is not entirely representative of Harry Potter fandom.

The documentary is in the worst tradition started inadvertently by Errol Morris. Thanks to movies like GATES OF HEAVEN (good) and FAST, CHEAP AND OUT OF CONTROL (not so good) there are now hundreds of third-rate amateurs who figure that all they need to do to make a documentary is find some group of quirky weirdos--or, worse, several groups of weirdos who actually don't have that much connection to each other--then roll the cameras for a few hours and print up the results. "We Are Wizards" makes only the vaguest attempt to force any kind of structure or point of view on what is, for the most part, an amorphous collection of interview and convention footage. Various assortments of losers come into focus for a few minutes hither and thither. There are a number of garage bands who write songs about the Harry Potter universe; none of the people we see can actually sing and nobody knows more than three guitar chords. The worst of the lot are a Harry Potter-inspired death metal wannabe (sporting a round physique, a balding pate and a mighty neckbeard that makes him look a lot like the Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers) and, worse, a couple of homeschooled kids who give off a creepy "Jesus Camp" vibe but for a different reason. There are people who live for running Harry Potter fansites and who--when the documentary makes a laughable attempt at drumming up tension--make a huge deal of theirdisillusionment when they find out that Warner Brothers doesn't care about Harry Potter fans. There's a spectacularly unfunny cartoonist who's got a sideline in recording ham-fisted parody audio tracks for the Harry Potter movies. Five minutes with any of these people is enough to make you run screaming to the asylum gates clawing to escape from the madness. And we get to spend eighty minutes with them!

Roger Ebert has wisely told us, "A movie is not what it is about. It is about how it is about it." I'm not sure he is entirely correct; there must be some subject so arid, so devoid of interest and entertainment, that even the most artfully filmed movie about that subject cannot possibly hope to be good viewing. Of all the documentaries I've seen, "We Are Wizards" comes closes in that regard. All you can do is boggle at these people, singing their ghastly songs and recording their painfully belabored parodies, and ask them: didn't anyone, at any time, even suggest to you that maybe you need to improve your voice or write better jokes? Is this what enthusiastic fandom does to people? Make them into colossal bores?

"We Are Wizards" makes one attempt to present an alternate viewpoint and it's so thoroughly misguided and formulaic that I must comment on it. You see, the movie opens not with bad Harry Potter music or worse Harry Potter riff-tracking but with a voice-over from a woman who believes that the Harry Potter phenomenon is seducing children to dabble with the occult. We've heard that line before and it raises the promise--cruelly dashed--that the movie will be about that ginned-up controversy and not just about a pack of talent-free musicians and cartoonists. The woman who thinks J. K. Rowling is turning children to the Dark Side, after that first voice-over, doesn't reappear until nearly the end of the movie, so that she has the effect of "bookending" the movie. What's more, while all of the miscellaneous losers we've seen have been emphatically American, the anti-HP woman has a British accent, the only one in the movie, and she's also the only real adult. Everyone else we've seen have been children and unformed men in their twenties who might as well be children. Therefore We Are Wizards casts opposition to Harry Potter mania into a familiar mold: it's the stuffy, Old World, schoolmarmish reaction to the boundless energy of fresh-faced American youths who just want to express their creativity. (Much is made, by the way, of how "creative" all of this imitative and talentless zeros are.) Worse, the introduction of this notion that Harry Potter books might be leading kids to dabble with witchcraft goes unexamined because its one voice in the documentary is given to a ridiculous and schematized figure. Why not dig into that more? For all I know there are kids who decide to buy books on Wicca after reading Harry Potter. Hopefully they thence discover that "witchcraft" is nothing more than warmed-over and sanitized 19th century British occultism and quartz crystals strip-mined from Brazil, but that's hoping for too much, perhaps. All the same, whether or not there actually is any real connection between Harry Potter fandom and interest in the occult--which is a real thing, just not the thing that right-wing crazies seem to think it is--would have been far, far more interesting a topic of inquiry than what "We Are Wizards" gave us to watch.

All in all, a thoroughly wretched movie about unpleasant people and with zero insight into the phenomenon it purports to investigate. The worst documentary I've seen, and I've seen some wretched ones.

Sure, Neil Connery is a bit of dud both as an actor and a character. The rest of the movie, though, is a hoot to watch. That isn't something you can say about "real" Bond movies like, say, _The Man with the Golden Gun_. Even Sean Connery could be boring. Can you remember anything about _You Only Live Twice_ aside from a few action sequences? Go ahead, I dare you. Nor is the plot of _O.K. Connery_ any less preposterous than most Bond movies'.

If nothing else, it's got Adolfo Celi in a smoking jacket strutting around with a cigar and supervillainous music backing him up. More than worth the price of admission.

We meet Jeff, sporting pants pulled halfway up to his armpits and a checked bow tie with the wingspan of an albatross, wearying his dog with a long lecture about popularity. He tells the dog he'll be popular because he dresses like a clothing-store dummy. He explains to the dog that he'll be popular because his girlfriend is popular, even if "she's not the best looking girl in town" (what a class act Jeff is!) He assures the dog that he'll be popular because Daddy will lend him the car to take his girl to a class party.

But his grandmother injures herself in a fall and his father is compelled to take the car instead. Jeff reacts as any caring son would: he accuses his father of betraying his promise and deliberately sabotaging his popularity--think of that video-game playing kid who screams to his mother "You're a liar!!!" because she doesn't bring him chocolate milk and you'll get an idea of Jeff's mood. He rips up the invitation to the class party, phones his girlfriend to call in sick, and then instead of staying at home like any sensible malingerer he goes out to the drugstore to lecture _them_ about popularity. Then his girlfriend enters the drugstore to buy ice cream...what will happen next? What little entertainment is to be had from UNDERSTANDING YOUR IDEALS is in this first half. It's immensely satisfying to see the moronic Jeff standing in the drugstore looking like he's two seconds away from crying, getting both a furious tongue-lashing from his girlfriend and mocking laughter from his friends. But you'll have to put up with his uttering "popular" in almost every single sentence he utters; make a drinking game of it and you'd be under the table halfway through the first scene.

Then, after Jeff gets his well-deserved humiliation, he comes home and gets a talking-to from his dad, whereupon the short film falls completely apart. Apparently popularity at school is somehow connected with the concepts like freedom of speech and religious belief; I guess it's failure to grasp these abstracts that leads you to lie to your girlfriend and saying the word "popular" a lot. It's like the makers of this short had bits of two different films they had to join together. They even missed the opportunity to make a _relevant_ connection between Jeff's social incompetence and ethical ideals: his dad could have pointed out Jeff's hypocrisy in whining about his dad's broken promise and then, thirty seconds later, breaking his _own_ promise in standing up his date. Instead we get a bizarrely irrelevant soliloquy about the men who built civilization and suchlike things, a dreadful bore to watch even with Mike Nelson making fun of it

I think the real lesson of THE VIOLENT YEARS is that girls make really stupid criminals. Robert DeNiro's gang in HEAT is torn to pieces after the cops show up during a major-league bank heist; the same thing happens to spoiled rich girl Paula and her crew, only it's because the cops interrupt them while inflicting minor, easily reparable damage on a schoolroom. This action (sort of) set piece is a hoot to watch: the girls go wild, erasing the blackboard and ripping up the desktop blotter and turning over the chairs, but then as one girl contemplates desecrating the American flag the cops show up. Rather than face a juvenile hall stay for breaking windows, Paula and the gang do what any smart criminals would do: get out their irons and start blasting. Paula further demonstrates her criminal smarts by killing a cop, then demanding payment for the botched job from her boss--who, because she is also a female criminal in the world of THE VIOLENT YEARS, instead of playing it safe and playing for time, promptly turns her back on the desperately stupid brat brandishing a gun and an inflated ego.

You have to give Paula this, anyway; she's smarter than Jimmy Wilson in I ACCUSE MY PARENTS. But then he at least had genuinely bad parents. Paula's folks are kindly and ridiculously generous, plying her with new dresses and a new car *every year*. But her dad was always so busy at his job and her mom so engaged in her charity work (remember that, mothers: having an outside interest means your child will turn to crime) that attention-starved Paula was forced to take up petty theft. She's almost adorable with her affected snarl and tough-girl talk as she struggles valiantly to strike a fearsome pose. To make herself feel better she takes care to surround herself with only with pathetic lowlifes and third-raters; in one hilarious bit, a reporter visits her (very tame) birthday sleep-over and drops one of her male friends with a single punch. It all makes for an entertaining ride through the laughable career of one of the dumbest crooks ever to star in a movie.

Well, almost. The movie rolls along until the last act, when it suddenly freezes in its tracks to mete out poetic justice and endless lecturing from a judge who tells us that the only way to stamp out youthful crime is with corporal punishment in the "old fashioned woodshed" and with regular church-going. (As Mike Nelson summarizes, "Beat the love of Jesus into them!") Not content to punish Paula with a life sentence and death in childbirth, the movie then punishes both her parents *and* her baby daughter by refusing the parents custody and sentencing the daughter to life in a state home. Mike and the 'bots salvage some entertainment from the droning moralizing; I can scarcely imagine what it must have been like to watch in the movie theater. Ironically it might have been better in the hands of Ed Wood, who supplied the story but not the direction. THE VIOLENT YEARS is competently directed as Ed Wood could never have managed but at least Eddie had the sense to keep his pontificating short. Even the ridiculous "pornography is worse than dope peddling" scene from THE SINISTER URGE is over with in less time than it takes for the hectoring judge in THE VIOLENT YEARS to tell us what time of day it is.

I've seen the PRINCE OF SPACE MST3K episode many times and, every time I do, I hate those children more and more. They are more than just merely annoying whiners, like the kids in the Gamera movies (excepting the first one, where the child goes way past annoying into psychotic.) They are intolerably selfish, interfering, unappetizing little rugrats. The leader of the pack, Whatsisname, repeatedly insults Wally and calls him a coward ("nya nya nya you's too scared!"); of course this is supposed to be ironic, considering that Wally is really the hero, but instead it leaves you wondering why the Prince bothers to save the little snots who put him down all the time. Whatsisname demonstrates his own courage by screaming for the Prince's help every ten seconds and by preparing to summon the Prince (who gave Whatsisname Jimmy Olson's watch) just for the hell of it even though the spoiled brat himself admits there's no sign of trouble. (Yet.)

Still, the movie is a hoot to watch, and perfect fodder for MST3K for that reason; the show's formula really works only for movies that are tolerably entertaining on their own. Compare the episode featuring the superficially simpler INVASION OF THE NEPTUNE MEN: the MST3K episode is dull and colorless because the movie is dull and colorless, a grey slog through wads of stock footage and padding. Mind you, PRINCE OF SPACE has its own form of padding: since every single goddamn human in the movie reacts to every situation with baffled interrogatives ("huh? what? what's that? what'd you say?") PRINCE OF SPACE gets to repeat a lot of its dialogue twice or even three times. This is especially bad in the little scene where a fighter pilot is sent to investigate the disappearance of a passenger jet: the last human words that the doomed pilot hears are approximately the following:

"What's the matter? What's the matter? Can you read me? What's the matter? What's the matter? What? What do you say?"

Poor guy.

The superficial similarity is there: invaders come to conquer earth and alien-in-human-guise fights them off, earning the admiration of unpleasant children. Beyond that two movies are not very much alike.

I can't be sure but I'm partly convinced that PRINCE OF SPACE was meant as a comedy. There's not a single person in the movie with even a shred of competence or dignity with the possible exception of the Prince himself, and even he makes some really dumb decisions. The aliens are devoid of menace, the scientists are helpless babies, and the children are selfish little snots good only at getting in the Prince's way. All these things stand in contrast to INVASION OF THE NEPTUNE MEN. The aliens are not goofy and, in the scene where they disguise themselves as human soldiers, they are even a bit menacing. The scientists put up strong resistance against the aliens even if, in the end, they need Space Chief to bail them out. The Chief isn't a swaggering buffoon--no "hahahaha your weapons are useless" nonsense from him--and his child fans get hardly any scenes.

It's almost like PRINCE OF SPACE is a parody of the story that INVASION OF THE NEPTUNE MEN plays straight. NEPTUNE MEN feels like it's trying to be a serious sci-fi movie...which is maybe why it's such a crashing bore compared to PRINCE OF SPACE.

It boggles the mind that anyone could possibly defend this movie as some sort of lost classic or claim that people only say it's bad because it was on "Mystery Science Theater". When *two* lengthy scenes in a movie consist largely of footage borrowed from better movies, and when both of those scenes could be removed without anyone noticing the break, you know that the director's aim was to exert himself as little as possible to get the required length of film in the can. Anyone here with a burning zeal to uphold the reputation of THE CASTLE OF FU MANCHU against its boorish detractors is almost certainly exerting more effort on the movie's behalf than Jess Franco ever did.

Nevertheless, the film is not among the all-time worst. Roger Ebert is correct when he says, "There's probably a level of competence beneath which bad directors cannot fall....they've got to come up with something that can at least be advertised as a motion picture, released and forgotten." It can be safely conjectured that this was just what Jess Franco wanted. The dialogue is passable, the acting (what little is needed) is serviceable, and occasionally the editing actually drums up something like tension.

So if no one aspect of THE CASTLE OF FU MANCHU is really *that* bad, why is watching the whole film such a chore? A bad movie can be difficult to watch, but an *aggressively* mediocre one can be worse. When Roger Corman cranked out his listless, paint-by-numbers adventures and fantasy movies, at least he had the excuses of working with zero budget, a cast of third-stringers, and shooting schedules permitting him maybe a week's use of a sound stage. I'm guessing that Franco's budget was scarcely greater, but he had a decent cast and enough freedom for location shooting in more than one country. Yet he produced a movie as uninspired and perfunctory as Corman did at his worst. What was Franco thinking?

The plot seems almost to go out of its way to abandon consistency. Fu Manchu kidnaps Prof. Heracles and then his doctor because he needs help to make the magic freezing crystals in quantity (crystals, by the way, which also perform the totally unrelated duty of a knockout gas), but then even though we see Heracles at the end refuse to help Fu Manchu, his refusal doesn't even slow Fu Manchu down, who initiates his freezing plan without apparent need for Heracles's assistance. We *had* seen Fu Manchu demanding a ransom earlier one (without bothering to name terms) but any idea of actually collecting on the ransom never comes up. Fortunately for the world Nayland-Smith shows up to foil his plot to freeze the ocean, although Franco can't be bothered to show us how he foils it. We see him beating up some flunkies and trying to contact London by radio, then suddenly there's a loud report and soon Fu Manchu is watching helplessly as everything blows up around him. I'm used to villain's fortresses improbably blowing up because the hero fires one well-placed shot or smashes one control panel, but THE CASTLE OF FU MANCHU gives us the only case of a villain's fortress exploding merely because the hero makes a long-distance phone call.

It's not as though Franco didn't have enough screen time to fill these plot holes. It's just that he decided to fill that time with lengthy establishing shots, walking, and creeping around dark corridors and tunnels. He also directs his actors to speak as slowly as possible and pause whenever possible. They have excuses, I suppose. Fu Manchu is "inscrutable", being an offensive Oriental stereotype, and Omar Pasha is probably stoned out of his mind on opium half the time. The police chief in Istanbul simply doesn't care and spends a good deal of his screen time sulking and telling people not to bother him. And why should he bother doing his job? He's played by Jess Franco, after all.

With so little actually happening in THE CASTLE OF FU MANCHU, we have to be content with watching the scenery. There are some beautiful background shots in the film, to be sure. Mostly, though, Franco traps us in Fu Manchu's lair. The quarter-hours slip by as the "action" takes us from one room or chamber to another and another, none of them very well lit, while Christopher Lee sits and looks smug, or stands up and looks smug, or even speaks while looking smug. Eventually a lot of people die and Fu Manchu disappears into the billowing fake smoke. Dry ice, Rosco fog, and blood, indeed.

Both are produced by Union Pacific Railroad but take completely different approaches. The tone of "Last Clear Chance" is angry and hectoring, featuring a truculent state trooper who harangues the Dixon family, and us, on following traffic rules and signs. All to no avail, of course: one of the young Dixons drives immediately from the lecture into a train, looking backwards and laughing all the way.

"The Days of Our Years" tries a different method, not aggressive but passive-aggressive. Instead of a browbeating cop there's a mild-mannered priest with a soothing voice. Selfishness and private life are to blame in all three cases: Joe rolls over his truck because he's in a haste to get together with his fiancée, George pushes himself too far because he's looking forward to a comfortable retirement, and Lenny gets a torch in the face because he's overjoyed at the birth of his son. The (one hopes) unintentional message is that having a life outside of work is begging for a lethal accident and insincere compassion from a blase churchman. No doubt he twists the knife a little further into innocent George every Sunday.

It's not an accident, I'm sure, that the toy which Lenny gives to his son at the end of the movie is a toy train.

Yeah, it was wrong of Johnny to cheat, but look at what else we see: Mary feeds him answers without a second thought but is credited with no blame because she "was only trying to help". Jim pressures Johnny to blow off his homework. The student council goes behind Johnny's back to eject him without giving him a chance to defend himself. I ended up feeling kind of sorry for Johnny at the end.

The omnipresent narration, berating Johnny non-stop for his moral bankruptcy, reminds me of the Alfred Hitchcock style narration in "The Last Hungry Cat", the Merrie Melodies cartoon where Sylvester the Cat is tortured with guilt because he thinks he ate Tweety Bird.

Other people have gone over this movie's strengths. Yeah, it comes across like a really low-rent "Dragnet" episode sometimes with way, way too much narration, and there are a couple scenes that drag horribly. And what *is* with those too-often repeated closeups of Lon Chaney's eyes? They almost seem like padding.

But for the most part the film rolls along at a good clip and keeps the suspense going. There are some good L.A. locations, too, including the cool diagonal streetcars also seen in "Kiss Me Deadly". Just because it's been on MST3K doesn't mean it's among the all-time worst. (In fact, the better the movie, the better the episode, usually.)

It's not the MST3K influence. The Great Vorelli is the biggest problem with the film. Whether it's the character or the performance that's more to blame I don't know, but Vorelli is for whatever reason a dull, flat, one-note villain. He plays every scene at the same pitch, no matter what's going on. Seductive or scared out of his wits he sounds exactly the same. He's got no backstory; he's evil...just because, I guess, and even his greed for an heiress's money seems more a requirement of the plot than anything else. He's not charming and he's not visibly talented, and the movie gives us no earthly reason why anyone should applaud his act. Who wants to pay to see a monotonous ventriloquist heap abuse on a dummy? In any case, with such a dead lump of a villain at the heart of the movie, and a hero who does nothing at all, the best production values in the world couldn't save this movie.